I recently had some time available and decided to add to my 15mm miniatures. I succumbed to severe temptation and purchased some expansions to my “Space Demons” army from Khurasan Miniatures. http://khurasanminiatures.tripod.com/ I was very pleased with what I got!

What did I get? The “Space Demon Great Queen” and the “Space Demon Trolls”. The Great Queen is a resin and metal mini and the Trolls are all metal. These are all giants in the 15mm scale. They would be greater-than-human-sized monsters in 28mm. Khurasan’s web site has some comparison pictures with different scaled minis for size – that way his customers can make informed purchasing decisions.

So – reviewing the pieces. Well, the service from Khurasan is outstanding and the shipping was lightning quick. I was even able to add an additional mini to my order (more on that later) that he was able to toss in by reopening the already packed order. Already packed on the same evening I ordered it online! 🙂

When the pieces came I was very impressed with the quality of the basic components. The quality is outstanding, with very few lines, minimal flash and easy-to-remove sprues. The combo of resin and metal for the Great Queen is good quality and the pieces fit together very well.

Great Queen parts right out of package. Regular Space Demon in picture for scale…

Great Queen parts closer look

Pieces for the Space Demon Great Queen and both Space Demon Trolls

The Space Demon Trolls are also neat sculpts and are massive hunks of metal. They come with their own metal bases with uniquely spaced mounting holes for the pegs in the feet. Unpainted they are hard to judge, but the molding and sculpting looks very nice.

Close up of the resin parts for Great Queen – sexy gribbly-licious stuff!

The quality of the sculpt in the resin is quite high. No molding issues of any consequence. A couple of “almost bubbles” that blend right in with the gribblies on the sculpt.

Now then, if I was going to have a Winged Space Demon Queen, well, she would need some winged troops to follow her. After digging through my bits parts in despair of wings I chanced to pick up one of my son’s new Tyranid Gargoyles. The wings were too big to use whole but were shaped right for trimming down. No…I did *not* start carving his Tyranid Gargoyles apart while he played “Eve Online” in his room. Tempting, but…well, thank you bits sellers on E-bay. I order 5 pairs of wings for a little over $10 with shipping. They came in the mail 2 days later.

Space Demons with Wings!!!

Luckily I had some unfinished Space Demons from a prior order. A little trimming of the wings, a little Green Stuff and Superglue and – presto – five Winged Space Demons! Now that is exceptionally scary!

After a few days of painting I now have some cool-looking, scary and Super-gribbly sexy Space Demons to add to my forces!

A “posed” picture of some of the Space Demons meeting a group of lunch…uh, humans

Okay, if you look in the picture above you will see the additional figure I ordered from Khurasan that got tossed into the same package. The lovely lady with the M4 machine gun for a right leg – Miss Sheri Amour! Why she was traveling with those scientists digging in the ancient ruins is a mystery. Miss Amour normally is seen hobnobbing with zombies as she blows their frakking heads off with her leg…

A closer shot of the Winged Space Demons now that they are painted.

I put some colors on the black undercoat of my Space Demons. It helps them stand out on the table a bit and makes it easier to differentiate groups of them during games. I gave the Winged Space Demons a reddish drybrush color reasoning that they may be trying to “stand out” to impress the Queen…if they have eyes. Hmmm…I’ll have to ask them how they see sometime…

The Space Demon Trolls are gargantuan smashing monsters, perfect for ripping through buildings and armored vehicles

I painted the Space Demon Trolls in a lightly applied grayish color. It seemed to emphasize their brutish powerful appearance.

The Space Demon Great Queen and some of her Winged Consorts

I painted the Great Queen with several colors – predominantly reddish on her wings, spine and head crest and gray-green on her arms and legs. Some purple for her extensible jaws and gribbly belly parts and some bone white for claws. Ain’t she sexy!

Painted, the Space Demon Great Queen and the Space Demon Trolls look pretty darned neat – even with my sucky paint jobs. I am very happy with them and am planning some games of “Tomorrow’s War” around them. It will definitely take armored vehicles to take them on! I don’t know whether Sheri Amour will show up but you never know…

Greetings to everyone who figured I lost interest and dropped out of doing fun gaming things. Not true (sort of). I did cut back a lot due to lots of real life happening. However, inspiration and -rarest of all- more time has given me a chance to do some things and get rolling for more! [Heh – “get rolling” – that’s a pun for later in this blog post 😉 ]

Current project is a fun one: While searching the intarwebs for Giant Monster Gaming rule sets after seeing (and loving) “Pacific Rim” I ran across a mention of a game involving “post apocalyptic car combat in the desert wastelands of the future”. I am the kind of person whose eye is caught by such phrases [be worried] and my curiosity bump slugged my cerebrum in the shoulder and said “Hey! Look into this! This sounds like fun!” [be more worried that I think my cerebrum has a shoulder]. Links led me to this game: “Axles & Alloys” by Coopdevil in the U.K. Here is his blog/website for the game:

The rules are in sort of a fossilized beta – since around 2010. However they look fast to play and are light-spirited for a set of post-apocalyptic car combat rules. The author refers to it as Axles & Alloys II: Dork Future. It apparently was all the rage a few years ago on “The Miniatures Page”. Well, figures that I am continually behind the curve. Still gonna dive into it!

So, the core components for the game are cars, trucks and such. While there are suppliers on the web where you can purchase miniature cars and trucks already designed for “future vehicular combat” (example: http://www.stanjohansenminiatures.com/Road%20cars.htm ) the real fun described by the game designer involves purchasing “Hot Wheels” and “Matchbox” toy cars and the like and then kitbashing them into your post-apocalyptic-machines-of-DEATH! Uh…sorry, got carried away there. Anyway, like a lot of gamers who have a few (hundred) Games Workshop models and minis lying about I have a reasonable “bits box”. Sure enough, spending about $7 on toy cars and delving through my bits box I had the makings of, well, miniature mayhem.

Below are a few pics of my mostly-finished first batch of Axles & Alloys combat vehicles. Right now in my basement the textured paint is drying on some simple pieces of desert terrain that I have been needing an inspiration to work on for a long time. Gaming will come soon!

I play wargames for fun and to use my brain in moving around little plastic and tin soldiers. There are no “lead widows”, the soldiers may fail morale rolls and fall back but there are no real casualties, no lead and plastic psychological traumas and at the end of the game there’s just jokes and story swapping.

Not at all like real life.

I have friends and relatives who are active duty members in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps of the United States of America. The least of them is worth more than my pasty white, soft-bellied carcass on my best day. They could run my butt into the ground in just the first hour of their average day. Those that have “seen the elephant” have endured more grief, horror and fear than I will ever know in my life, all because they chose, they VOLUNTEERED, to be part of something bigger than themselves.

I cannot be grateful enough for that. It is not possible for me to pay back the debt I owe all of them. All I can do is respect their sacrifices and pray for their safety and the well-being of them and their families.

And I do that, not as often as I should but perhaps more often than some.

Members of my family, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides have served in the Armed Forces to at least back to the United States Civil War (or the “War of Northern Agression” if you were to ask some of those ancestors – I was born in New Orleans, Lousiana and my mother’s family comes from south Mississippi). Not every one in every generation has served but, I believe, some from every generation. I and my country are here today in part due to their actions.

Thank you all of you who serve, who have served or who will serve to sacrifice valuable time of their lives to stand between my country and its enemies. Please do not ever think that because I have a hobby of playing with toy soldiers that I ignore or scoff at the service of our REAL soldiers.

I was worried that it was going to be the end of the world. My calendar for 2011 ENDED at the end of December! There was nothing after that. That just HAD to mean it was the end! Then my sweet wife came back from grocery shopping and – lo and behold – she had a calendar for 2012! The world was not ending just because the calendar did. How silly of me to think that an arbitrary end of a calendar cycle would herald the end of the world…nobody could be that silly. Could they?

Anyway, my work on miniatures progresses. I saw an exceptionally cool posting on the 15mm Sci Fi forum of “The Miniatures Page” about using some Matchbox “UFO” models from the late 1990’s as miniatures. I just had to try it and…one (or two, you know how it goes) E-Bay orders later I had a basic one to work with. Some super-glueing and repainting left me with this:

Some Nirs Empire infantry backed up by one of their Dropship/Grav Tank/APCs...

The Matchbox UFOs come in a gold and purple scheme – I repainted it but kept the theme gold and purple, which just happened to fit some of the Nirs Marines quite well. In the “Tomorrow’s War” rules these would be Tech Level 3 grav vehicles and would mix dropship with tank with APC. When you get to a certain point with grav vehicles they kind of lost the distinction. You define them by the role they are currently serving. The photo above shows it on a stand, acting sort of like a vtol or a grav tank with pop up capability.

Now the vehicle is acting like a grav tank or Infantry Fighting Vehicle

I did do some modification to the Matchbox UFO model. It had no visible weapons – so I searched through my various bits until I found something I could use for a “main gun”. What I found were some small space ship minis that I had used as part of a fleet for “Full Thrust”. They were perfect!

I used some “green stuff” epoxy to secure magnets to the “main gun” and to the ufo body and there you go: instant turret! The gun can come off for storage and swivels in the game, just to let the enemy shudder in fear as it points at them!

My workspace is pictured below where I will be painting up 3 more of those beauties!

Nirs grav vehicles under construction

I thought I would share this. I will have some more cool (well, cool to me) stuff to show soon! Have a great day!

I *was* going to enter the Ambush Alley Games “Strike Force” contest with these forces. Then I saw the paint jobs on the competition and realized I was sorely outclassed in painting skills. However, I will provide a band-aid to my vanity and show the pictures off in my Blog. I paint things so they look okay on the table for gaming. I don’t think I will ever be a contest-winning artist. However, I do have fun with it and that is what really counts! (I keep telling myself that…)

Here is my first completed force: A strike force for the “Order of St. Mauricius”, the military arm of the “Primacy of Alterarum Terrarum”, also known as “church space” in the “Tomorrow’s War” rulebook. This is a region of space with worlds colonized by the Catholic Church.

I am preparing a campaign on a planet where the Order of St. Mauricius is being used as the “bad guys” to overthrow a successful colonial rebellion. Thus, I needed a coherent-looking armed force. I wanted them in reddish colors and found that “rust red” paint ended up looking pretty good.

The Order of St. Mauricius Strike Force

The forces of the Order of St. Mauricius, at least how I am developing them, include “Indoctrinators”, armed deacons who work to keep the morale of their squads burning at a fever pitch. Sort of like “”Commisars” from the Soviet Union and certain “not-to-be-named” games… I used Rebel Mini’s “Gun Clerics” for those figures. The rest of the OSM infantry figs are Rebel Minis “Earth Forces Drop Troopers”.

Closeup of 2 Scout Squads and their Grav Scout APCs

The vehicles in the force came from Combat Wombat Miniatures and from Matchbox Cars.

Closeup of Scout Squad Baker 9 - note the military crest for the Order on the nose of the Grav APC

Closeup of Recon Squad Able 5 - including Armed Combat Bot

My force needed some infantry heavy weapons and Rebel Minis didn’t provide anything suitable, so I added some “combat bots” by raiding my supply of re-based power-armored figures from “Mechwarrior Dark Age”. The arm/leg length ratio on the MDA figure is not really proportional for a 15mm scale human, but if you say it is a humanoid combat drone carrying heavy weapons then it fits right in.

Note the small gun poking out of the lower front of the wheeled APCs. I added this to make them “armed” as opposed to “unarmed”, plus it fills a rivet hole in the Matchbox “Armored Response Vehicle”.

The "Armored Fist" of the Strike Force - Grav Tanks via Combat Wombat

The heavy punch of the strike force is provided by two Medium Grav Tanks and three Heavy Grav Tanks. These units can be either hammer or anvil as needed. They are also fun to paint.

A look down the line of the Strike Force

Now, I have been playing around with “alien” concepts too. I had some lucky finds when shopping at “Recruits” and bought a batch of “Battlestations” miniatures. I thought they would make great “Tomorrow’s War” aliens that did not look like “men in rubber suits”. Thus I created the “Nirs Empire”, a multi-species polity that human space is just about to start bumping up against. None of the species in the Nirs Empire are humanoid at all…

Exploratory force of the Nirs Empire

The “Battlestations” “Canosian Marines” are heart of the Nirs Empire forces. They are backed up by the physically stronger, six-limbed “Xeloxians”, who even have some power-armored figures.

I have been busy with lots of things in life and haven’t gotten much gaming in. Today I managed to play a game of “Tomorrow’s War” with my friend Mike. I chose the scenario “Tigers by the Tail” from page 121 of the “Tomorrow’s War” rulebook. It seemed like a fairly simple “tanks only” scenario and would be good to keep trying to familiarize my friend with the TW rules.

The scenario takes place on the colony world of Glory, during a war between the “Democratic People’s Republic of Glory” or “DPRG” and the “Republic of Arden” or “RA”. The DPRG is a reincarnation of North Korea, only worse. The Republic of Arden is a growing, free country. Expansion on the planet of Glory has led to conflict between these two powers. The United States has chosen to aid the Republic of Arden and has sent a Marine Expeditionary Force to help. This scenario is based on the first contacts between the advancing armored columns of DPRG tanks and the point scouts of the USMC forces. It also represents a clash between obsolete tanks fielded by the DPRG and the most advanced tanks fielded by the United States. The DPRG tanks are Tech Level 1 and the USMC tanks are Tech Level 3.

Overview of the battlefield for "Tigers by the Tail".

Here is the battlefield setup for the game. The trees go right to the edge of the road, actually slowing the vehicles down as they pass through. Vehicles can go no faster on the road through the woods than they can in the woods off road.

Two of my "Hammer's Slammers" blowers are used for the "Perkins" Main Battle Tanks for the USMC

The USMC sent a force of two tanks to try and delay and disrupt the advancing column of DPRG tanks. The “Perkins” grav tanks are armed with 180mm fusion guns and gauss machine guns that have some anti-tank capability. They are deadly customers and very heavily armored too!

Two of the DPRG "Chonma-Ho III" Main Battle Tanks

The “Chonma-Ho” Main Battle Tanks fielded by the DPRG were considered obsolete when they were used in this conflict. Their armor is light and they are uparmed with Tech Level 2 Advanced Ballistic Main Guns. They are outclassed in every way by the USMC tanks.

The DPRG column on-road at the beginning of the scenario. Platoon Leader Bai's tank is #65

The scenario starts with the DPRG tanks in column on the road and the USMC tanks starting somewhere within one foot of the west edge of the map. Mike played the DPRG forces and I played the USMC forces. I set one of my tanks in the little clump of woods in the northwest and the other deep in the western woods.

At the start of Turn 1 the USMC tank gets its fangs pulled

At the start of Turn 1 the USMC tank in the small clump of woods executed a “Fire and Move” command. The rearmost DPRG tank was the target. That tank chose to react with fire. When we rolled our troop quality checks that tank go to shoot first. Wham! Main Gun destroyed on the USMC tank. The “move” portion of the “fire and move” turned into a pull back. My dice hate me!

I moved the other USMC tank out of the woods to get a shot at the middle of the column. One of the DPRG tanks reacted to my movement by trying to get a rear armor shot on me. I responded to the fire, losing some of the distance I intended to cover in the process. A quick exchange and “BLAM!”, the DPRG Platoon Leader’s tank went “kablooey” (that’s an ancient military technical term for “blown up, sir”). Some of the other DPRG tanks had reacted with movement and so were further down the road. My tank ended up not close enough to the road to see it through the trees.

Not the glorious ambush I had intended...

The Perkins MBT didn't quite get close enough to see through the woods.

When things go right they are singular. When things go wrong they come in clusters. My tanks were no not where I wanted them to be. It was the DPRG (Non-initiative player) turn to move things. The lead elements of the column moved down the road to get closer to their exit point. Then one of the DPRG tanks went on the offensive and charged up right behind the fully armed and undamaged USMC tank in the woods. He was executing a “move and fire” command. I intended to return fire. We rolled our Troop Quality rolls – he rolled a “6”, I rolled a “3”. He shot first and got one hit through my armor. A quick roll on the vehicle damage table produced an “8”. Sigh…vehicle brew up and casualty check.

The DPRG tank zooms up behind the USMC tank and delivers a knockout shot!

OUCH!

The rest of the DPRG column was heading for the exit point. I had one tank left with a Heavy-Duty Machine gun on it that had an anti-tank firepower of 2D8. Not exactly fear inspiring.

The rest of the DPRG column rolling down the road.

I was not able to do a move and fire with the remaining USMC Perkins tank (no targets) but I did perform a rapid move behind the woods to see whether I could get some luck long shots at the column as it emerged from the woods. The crafty DPRG player used his successful killer tank to chase mine down by cutting a diagonal through the woods. He took a shot at my tank so I responded as best I could with return fire.

The DPRG tank that made the first kill tries to make another one

This time the DPRG shot went “clang” off the armor of the USMC Perkins Main Battle Tank – as it should. The shot from the Perkins HMG (heavy machine gun) scored one hit on the Chonma-Ho III tank. The resultant roll on the damage table was “Main Gun Destroyed”.

Hmm, what's wrong with this picture?

The DPRG won the initiative for the remaining turns of the game. My only other shots with my HMG were futile, just clanging off armor. The DPRG scored a very decisive victory in this engagement.

Game end - Decisive DPRG Victory!

The Victorious DPRG Tanks

The Battlefield Carnage!

The game took only about an hour to play, flowed well and was lots of fun. The scenarios in the “Tomorrow’s War” rulebook are pretty good and I enjoy playing them. I must admit I was concerned with the game balance on this one. I thought it would be unbalanced in the USMC favor. Well, that turned out to be hubris on my part.